It was a rolling caramel avenue two-thousand feet wide, speckled with breaking waves and white foam. The brown current carried discarded barrels, trash, and the stripped trunks of dead trees like the trophies of a victorious army returning home.

She lowered her hand into the pocket of her jacket and withdrew a piece of paper folded in half. She opened and read it a final time.

March 29

Charlie,

Welcome home. I left your drill in the shed, behind the marked plank.

Lee

For her, the note and the flood both represented an ending. She folded the paper in half again, then added four more folds on one end to form a point.

At the base of the cliffs, the canal and the towpath were lost under the river. Further out the field of rocks below Seneca Falls was gone. A mile up the shoreline, the Dam 2 feeder and Violettes Lock were buried. Pennyfield Lock was underwater, a mile-and-a-half downstream. And Swains Lock. And three of the locks at Great Falls, just above Bear Island. She held the paper javelin aloft and launched it away from the cliffs. It sailed outward, hovered motionless for an instant, then dove toward the rolling waters below.

Part Three

Chapter 27

Rising

Friday, March 30, 1996

Vin stepped from the dance floor of the Spanish Ballroom and walked along a half-lit hallway, leaving the patter of voices behind. At the end of the hall he turned into a dark waiting room with wooden benches along the windowless walls. Across the room a door was ajar, and yellow light spilled in through the doorway. He walked through it into the next room.

To his right was an antique floor lamp that cast an amber glow over the walls and the Persian rug beneath his feet. The opposite wall held a portal next to a grandfather clock, and a leather divan with scroll arms reclined along the wall to his left. Resting between burgundy throw pillows on the divan was a long object curved into an S shape. He approached and saw it was a plush toy snake nearly six feet long, with black felt eyes and a faded speckled pattern on its worn fabric. Its stuffing was compressed and soft, maybe as old as he was.

He sensed a presence and turned to see a young woman standing in the portal wearing a jaguar mask. She had shoulder-length brown hair and was barefoot, dressed only in a tight, jade-colored skirt. Light from the single lamp cast the curves of her breasts into chiaroscuro. Her arms hung motionless at her sides, but he could sense the lithe, quick muscles within them. She glided over and stared at him through her mask, and he thought he saw her irises flicker.

She put her hands on his shoulders and guided him down to a sitting position on the divan, then knelt beside him and pulled off his shoes. He stared at her mask as she unbuttoned his shirt and proceeded to undress him. When she had finished, she tied the two ends of the plush snake into half-hitches around his wrists, then laid his shoulders back against the divan and guided the snake over the padded armrest to hold his arms in place. She climbed onto the divan with her knees astride his thighs and slowly lowered herself onto him. Leaning in and staring down at him through her feline mask, she rocked back and forth.

Vin’s eyes narrowed as the tide within him withdrew. Starfish and sea urchins emerged on the wet sand and legions of small fish flopped in shallow pools. The jaguar paced along the beach, eyes and hair rocking forward and back as it waited for the tsunami. When it came, Vin was flipped and tumbled in the rush of whitewater. He closed his eyes and lost his bearings as his senses were everted and extruded like a flare. The flare waned into staggered pulses that grew further apart and the glowing whitewater of the wave withdrew in a long steady roll. His breath came back into tidal rhythm as he opened his eyes.

The jaguar woman was sitting upright now, still holding his penis inside her. She pushed her mask back over her head and removed it, dropping it onto the divan, then looked down at him. It was Nicky, and he realized now that he’d known it all along. She pulled away from him and he felt an echo of the extruded flare. Standing up, she flipped the snake over the scroll arm and onto his chest. He brought his hands together and pulled the half hitches loose.

“I’m going to take a shower,” Nicky said.

He followed her into the master bathroom. It had a spacious Mexican-tiled shower that was already running, filling the room with steam. The shower was partitioned from the bathroom by a curtain of hanging amber beads. He stood at a sink he’d never seen before and rinsed off his penis. “I think I’ll take Randy for a run on the towpath down to Great Falls.”

“Be careful,” Nicky said, as she stepped through the bead curtain. “Someone reported seeing a bear in the woods down there yesterday.”

“That could be trouble,” he agreed. “Maybe we’ll run upstream instead.”

Immersed in the shower, Nicky didn’t answer.

He left the bathroom through a door that led to their bedroom, then dressed himself in running clothes and sneakers. Randy was already waiting just outside the sliding door, wagging his tail and pressing his nose against the glass. Vin let himself out and Randy raced across the lawn with Vin following at a jog, into the woods and down the hill to Pennyfield Lock. They crossed the footbridge and turned onto the towpath.

Two miles upstream they were nearing Violettes Lock when Vin checked his watch and saw that it was almost two-thirty. At four this afternoon there was an all-hands project meeting at his old company in Boston. The Rottweiler project manager was flying in from California and Vin was supposed to be there, but there was no way he could get to the airport and catch a flight in time. He shook his head in dismay and resigned himself to missing it.

Randy ran ahead along the towpath. As Vin followed, he saw the dog accelerate and dash into the woods between the towpath and the river. Vin ran faster until he reached the place where Randy had entered the woods, then stopped. The trees were thick here and he couldn’t see the dog or the river, but he heard an unbroken chorus of barking that seemed to be moving through the woods. He tried to track the commotion with his eyes. At first it seemed to be heading upstream and then it seemed to be coming toward him. Suddenly a flash of brown fur showed for an instant through the trees. It disappeared and emerged again. It was Randy, running back downstream through the woods, parallel to the towpath. The dog passed him and kept running, and Vin looked hard to see what was chasing him. Nothing.

Maybe Randy was the pursuer, not the prey. Vin sprinted back down the towpath calling Randy’s name. The barking continued, receding and approaching again. A quarter-mile from the Blockhouse Point cliffs, the apron between the towpath and the river narrowed steadily. The bear burst onto the towpath first, twenty strides ahead of Vin. It was much smaller than he expected, not much bigger than a cub, and ran with a lumbering gallop. Randy leapt out of the woods a few seconds later. Ignoring Vin’s calls, he continued to chase the bear down the towpath. Vin was surprised that he was able to keep pace with Randy and the bear. As the cliffs drew near, the apron disappeared entirely, leaving only a steep slope with rocks and scrawny trees between the towpath and the river.

Vin began to gain on Randy and the bear, and when he drew closer he saw that Randy’s quarry wasn’t really a bear. It was a beaver. Below Seneca Falls, where the river hugged the towpath, the beaver scampered down the rocky grade into the water. Randy followed, extending his front legs to brake his descent to the river. Vin ran to the spot and stumbled down the slope. He dove out away from the shore and swam toward Randy, who was floating on his back, paws and nose extended into the air. The beaver had disappeared.